In recent years, electronic spreadsheet programs have become well known tools for manipulating information on a computer. A conventional non-electronic spreadsheet could be defined as text or numeric data, arranged in a row-and-columns format.
An electronic spreadsheet program allows a user to create, modify and display spreadsheets. It also uses a two dimensional format, and manipulates various types of data, such as date, time, text, and numeric values. A conventional electronic spreadsheet is organized as a plurality of ‘Tabs’ wherein in each Tab the intersection of a column and a row is named a cell. For each cell or a group of cells, formatting instructions could be applied to perform additional treatments or to define style parameters such as width or color.
Although electronic spreadsheet programs have many advantages, they still require a non negligible amount of time for repetitive and tedious work especially for importation of data from source text files.
The following patents illustrate several solutions for reducing the time required to repeat those actions in conventional electronic spreadsheet programs.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,231,577 from Koss discloses a method and system for processing formatting information in a spreadsheet, relating to the field of computer systems, and more specifically, to a method and system for enhancing the performance of a spreadsheet application.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,566,068 from Ross discloses a method and system for identifying fields within input data, and more specifically for locating field breaks within input data.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,033,009 from Dubnoff discloses a system for generating worksheet files for electronic spreadsheets that offer automation of repetitive action to be performed with a technique for generating worksheet files of the type used by electronic spreadsheets.
While the above-described systems each address the aforementioned problem, nevertheless none offers a general solution to the successive importation into a single spreadsheet of multiple source text files having specific formats. The present invention solves this problem.